Aphasia in Turkish: Speech production in Broca's and Wernicke's patients

Abstract

Turkish speech production was studied in 7 Broca's and 10 Wernicke's aphasics. Turkish is an agglutinative language, with few free-standing closed-class morphemes. The speech of Broca's patients was not telegraphic; although nonfluent, noun and verb suffixes were used appropriately. The speech of Wernicke's aphasics was fluent, using a wide range of often inappropriate forms. Both groups used appropriate nominal morphology. Broca's patients used a limited set of verb forms in contextually appropriate fashion. Wernicke's patients used a wide range of verb forms, all morphosyntactically correct, but often semantically anomalous. Both groups retained canonical subject-object-verb word order and controlled various types of pragmatically appropriate word order variation. It is proposed that aphasic speech patterns reflect retrieval problems rather than impairment of a portion of the language system.